Extensible Markup Language (XML) Web services based on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) are the ubiquitous mechanism for integrating heterogeneous enterprise IT applications, defined by Web Services Description Language (WSDL) files and supporting XML Schema Definition (XSD) files. The interfaces are commonly designed using the JAVA® programming language, and the WSDL/XSD is generated using JAVA® technologies such as JAVA® beans, JAVA® Architecture for XML Binding (JAXB), and JAVA® API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS).
Using this approach, a problem arises when the object-oriented information model described in JAVA® is converted to the document-oriented model expressed by XML. In particular, if there are multiple references to the same object, an associated message will be bloated with duplicated data, as the references are expressed as nested XML elements. Although JAVA® has some primitive mechanisms to remedy this problem, there is no ability to prevent this from happening at design time.
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.